The other day, I told the baker that I was “sexually excited” about the ski tournament that’s set to happen in Gresse this weekend. WHY does “je suis excitee” have to mean that? It’s a bit antisocial of it, really. And it’s incredibly unfortunate that I’m one of those people who says “I’m SO excited” at least six times a day. To be honest, it was bound to happen eventually.
So life goes on in France! It’s snowing en ce moment (pretty heavily), so I’m feeling quite Christmassy inside the warm and cosy house…which is bad, really, because it’s now March. I’ve got almost ten months to wait. Damn it. And – knowing global warming – when Christmas does eventually come around again, it will most likely end up being ‘the hottest on record’. So I’d better embrace this ‘faux’ Noel, whilst it lasts!!
The orange-and-white family cat is crying at my door, asking for un petit peu d’attention. He seems to love me for some reason; it might be because I’m foreign, and he’s trying to be politically correct, but he genuinely shows a scary amount of interest in me! And when he gets into my room, he jumps into my suitcase and hides there, so I can’t throw him out (he bares his claws if I so much as suggest that he might like to go outside). He’s an amazing cat. Reminds me that if I were to come back as an animal in my next life (always a possibility..) I’d like to be a cat. They’re totally independent, incredibly clever, and the vast majority of them embody the word ‘attitude’. Yes, it’s a cat for me.
But news from France? Well, everything is still wonderful, and I still just think this family is one of the loveliest I’ve ever met. We play family games, go on family picnics, have been on a touristy trip to Grenoble (for my benefit), and everyone is basically constantly laughing and nattering away. I couldn’t really feel more at home, to be honest. Oh but I’m braving practicing my French on people my own age at the moment, which is always tricky, because they are a little less tolerant than adults…and a lot of witty English jokes seem to be lost, with the language barrier (which ends up killing them in the most brutal way). I also find it a lot harder to ask young people to repeat themselves, when I don’t understand what they’ve said. Well, I can ask them once or twice, but when it gets to the third or fourth time, I invariably end up just saying “oui”, to try to shunt them onto the next topic. That seems to be a really silly thing to do, because I have received an infinite number of seriously weird looks, following my timid little “oui”. Maybe I should change my default answer to “non”, next time?!
Grenoble!
Anyway, in other news, I managed to break the kitchen knife yesterday evening (a feat which I personally thought was impossible). I was cutting a cabbage, and it just snapped in two, in my hand. It was basically a Sword-In-The-Stone moment, except that I sadly wasn’t then crowned the “Rightwise King Born of England”. Instead, I just swapped knives and vowed I’d never buy a knife imported from Taiwan again.
Oh and I punctured the front left wheel of my lovely car that afternoon, too. It really was my day. Car filled with 11 year olds, on the way to a Music lesson, and I just had to run over a little stone, rendering the car temporarily ‘undrivable’. They were all obviously over the moon about it (“NO MUSIC!!”), and thankfully – before I tried my hand at being a mechanic in the middle of a mountain road – a knight in shining armour zoomed around the corner to save the day. How completely typical: I’ve got a puncture-free track record in England and then – two weeks into my French adventure – I have to get an incredibly dramatic one, in front of a lot of witnesses!! Bah!
Righty ho, well I’ve got to set off skiing now; duty calls! But finally, another interesting thing: in France, rock beats paper (in the game ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’). I think that is totally unacceptable, because it means that rock is the most powerful of all three (meaning that the ratio is not equal). How can this incredibly simple game have different rules in different countries? Crazy.*
À bientôt!
* I’m clearly not bitter…I just keep losing!!
Nell Fane 
Oooooh tell us more about the knight in shining armour!